NextBlock pumps $3M into Soda Labs for blockchain privacy push

• NextBlock puts $3M into Soda Labs' seed funding.
• Soda Labs broadens its privacy infrastructure across major blockchains.
• The company aims to scale adoption, validators and financial integrations.

NextBlock has put $3 million into Soda Labs during its seed round, covering the entire closed round as the blockchain infrastructure firm advances its programmable privacy technology for financial transactions on public blockchains.

The funding arrives as Soda Labs transitions from its existing gcEVM privacy layer to Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic coprocessor meant to enable private computation across various blockchain networks.

For the past two and a half years, Soda Labs has been working on a cryptographic privacy solution built on garbled circuits and multiparty computation (GC-MPC).

The company noted that its system relies on well-established cryptographic standards such as AES and SHA256 and can function on standard cloud CPUs without requiring specialised hardware.

“What attracted us to Soda was not only the underlying cryptography, but the practicality of the technology for the financial workloads we believe will matter most onchain,” said Pieter van Poecke, Founder and General Partner of NextBlock.

Van Poecke added that Soda already had a working product and paying customers, while its technical intellectual property, technical founding team and commercial capabilities provided a foundation for its next phase.

Soda Labs expands privacy infrastructure

On the COTI network, more than 100 million transactions have been handled by Soda's technology. Its live applications include tokenisation platform Zoniqx and perpetuals exchange PriveX.

PriveX has handled over $20 billion in trading volume, while Zoniqx is onboarding issuers across multiple asset classes and jurisdictions, the company said.

Soda's existing gcEVM privacy layer is still active on COTI. The firm is now broadening its setup via Soda Bubble, which is built to handle developer-defined workloads from different blockchains without revealing private data to the public or to Soda Labs itself.

Participants in the Bubble Validator Network can mathematically confirm that computations involving private data have been executed correctly.

Across major EVM ecosystems such as Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and Base, Soda Labs is expanding Bubble. The company is also pursuing expansion to non-EVM networks, including Solana.

Company targets commercial adoption

Over the next 12 to 18 months, the fresh funding will allow Soda Labs to concentrate on scaling commercial adoption and execution.

The capital will be used by the company for its go-to-market strategy, expanding the validator network, broader blockchain coverage, team growth and integrations with banks, payment companies, tokenisation platforms and other financial infrastructure providers.

Several undisclosed pilots are being conducted by Soda Labs with financial and infrastructure organisations, with the goal of turning them into production deployments.

Updated performance benchmarks are expected to be published by the company in the coming weeks. Soda noted that its latest testing on Arbitrum measured the complete transaction lifecycle on the live network, including encryption, MPC computation, consensus and settlement.

A five- to tenfold improvement over its previous benchmark was reported by the company, although the new results have not yet been released publicly. Soda also stated that its GC-MPC architecture can deliver roughly 10 to 100 times greater throughput and 100 to 1,000 times lower transaction costs compared with currently available alternatives.

“Public blockchains already have the liquidity, users and financial applications. What they lack is a way for regulated money to move without showing everyone everything,” said Avishay Yanai, Co-Founder and CEO of Soda Labs.

Yanai said Bubble is designed to provide banks, payment companies and tokenisation platforms with privacy and controlled disclosure while using the blockchain networks they already rely on.